Pitch strength and annoyance of acoustic analogs of flutter echo - a pilot study

The impetus for this pilot study was the observation of flutter echoes on the aisle of a church with a barrel-vaulted ceiling. When source and receiver height were comparable, the flutter echoes consisted of a 39-msec repeating pattern of three short pulses that persisted for reverberation times of up to 5 sec. The disruptive quality of these echoes perceptually was striking. It was hypothesized that the perception of a sequence of rapidly alternating periodicity pitches might be the source of this disruptive quality. A pilot study was conducted to assess the perceived pitch, pitch strength, and annoyance of isochronous and anisochronous synthetic pulse trains involving up to three different inter-pulse intervals per pattern. Intervals of the anisochronous pulse trains were controlled to create harmonic and inharmonic relationships among the intervals, which ranged from 5-20 msec. Twelve adult college students participated in the study remotely via videoconferencing due to social distancing requirements. A modified category scaling method was used. Participants positioned a slider on a graphical user interface to reflect their ratings of pitch strength and annoyance and used a slider to adjust the frequency of a reference tone for pitch matching. Results and implications for further research will be presented.

The Use of Temporal Check-All-That-Apply and Category Scaling by Experienced Panellists to Evaluate Sweet and Dry Ciders

Cider is a growing market in North America, but more studies need to be completed to fully understand ciders’ sensory properties. The primary objective of this study was to identify the differences in the sensory properties of ciders described as “sweet” or “dry” using both static (category scales) and dynamic (temporal check-all-that-apply, TCATA) sensory methodologies. The secondary objective was to evaluate experienced panellists with a familiar methodology (category scales) and an unfamiliar methodology (TCATA). The sweet ciders were characterized by sweet, floral, cooked apple, and fresh apple attributes, and they had a sour aftertaste. The dry ciders were found to be bitter, sour, earthy, and mouldy, and they had a sour and bitter aftertaste. The experienced panellists produced reproducible results using both methodologies; however, they did not find small differences between the cider samples. Future research should investigate a wider range of cider and investigate ciders’ aftertaste. More studies need to be completed on experienced panellists and on when researchers and the food industry should use them.

On the Protheticity of Olfactory Pleasantness and Intensity

In Exp. 1, the “protheticity” of the pleasantness of a diverse set of relatively isointensive odorants was estimated using exponents from power functions fitted by an iterative least squares procedure between scale values established by (a) magnitude estimation and (b) category rating and rank ordering. In Exp. 2, this procedure was applied to intensity data derived from quarter-log-step volume dilution series of two hedonically disparate odorants, furfural and methyl salicylate. The goodness of fit of the power functions was somewhat better for the intensity than for the pleasantness data. The pleasantness dimension of the diverse stimuli was slightly prothetic (respective category scaling and rank order/magnitude estimation exponents = 0.60 and 0.63). The intensity dimension of furfural was considerably more prothetic than that of methyl salicylate (respective category/magnitude estimation exponents = 0.20 and 0.68; respective rank order/magnitude exponents = 0.21 and 0.69). These data suggest that the degree of olfactory protheticity depends upon the stimuli as well as the attributes chosen for investigation and support the view that Stevens' metathetic/prothetic dichotomy has little utility in classifying the scaling attributes of odors. Whether the degree of protheticity reflects the nature or distribution of olfactory system receptive elements within the main olfactory pathway remains an empirical question which awaits a more specific understanding of the nature of olfactory coding at the level of the neuroepithelium.

On separating pain from the willingness to report it

Signal-detection methodology may be used to disentangle sensory from judgmental effects when analyzing sex differences in pain. An illustrative example is given by reanalyzing a published category-scaling experiment in terms of detection-theory indices. As a result, the apparent sex difference is recast in terms of a judgmental bias. [berkley]